pinkfloydpsw's Blog

This is a dreadful thing to come out with, if such utterances were countries, this one would be North Korea! 

In this short intro we see contained the will to preposition as definitively wrong, before objection, without dialectic, anyone who might have gone on to examine what then is inserted after. Often it’s something I, and many others who share my politics, already know we will not agree with, in fact may strongly disagree with and might wish to argue against. I feel it’s used too frequently now as a tool of the influencer or the media mouthpiece masquerading as a credible journalist. I contend the proposer mostly being unaware of, but may have just become comfortable with, this mode of narrating what is likely a supposition, a “stands to reason” conjecture, or a revelation that they wish it were so, that they choose to present as a fact that which is not. Let me suggest the statement “the queen has died” – this is a fact, the statements we heard on 09/09/22 from various broadcasting outlets like “a nation mourns the death of the queen”, or “I think I can say on behalf of everyone, how sorry we all are to hear that the queen has died” may contain this fact, but are not themselves entire statements of fact. Now I hope nobody is glad that the queen has passed away, but I personally am ambivalent.

For those who like to see the meaning within the string of words said or written, and to ask what they might suggest beyond what the statement is obviously saying, to get a feel for the motivation behind the speech, there is often a feeling something sinister is being wrapped within something innocuous. The sinister part is how language is used as a tool to limit thought and to motivate society by presenting subjective matters, those of how we feel about things, as objective matters, which are the provable qualities of a thing, its truth. Language contains in it the possibility to mislead, we all fall for this in many ways, but it also contains the ability to propagandize thought for purpose, that purpose being to have a citizenry act a certain way, we are all aware of this when it comes to advertising, but in other ways we seem completely blind to it.

The Emperor’s New Clothes is a children’s book about how a society comes to be a collective of individuals that believe that they are individually each in error when making a visual assessment of the Emperor’s new clothing. Each person believes of themselves that they cannot see the new clothing the Emperor is wearing because they must be in some way defective, the Emperor would not be standing there naked, that just wouldn’t happen. So a thing known, trumps a thing observed. This is very useful to governments that want you to maybe think a certain way about a certain event because of the way it is mediated. Let’s say like how a war plays out? In truth all wars are things where people die by the hand of the stronger or more resourceful force, it does not matter if that is a Ukrainian or a Palestinian, and it does not matter whether we are on one side or the other. Wars are not moral because they neither are fought for moral reasons, nor do they result in moral outcomes. They are really about the control of resources and media. Back to our crowd of onlookers, they believe each other person present can see the Emperor’s new clothes, that they, the others, are not defective. We know that the Emperor has too been fooled into believing that he also cannot see the clothes he is wearing, knows himself in error in that assessment, and knows that all of his subjects can in fact see them perfectly well. The Emperor would, of course, not appear in front of his subjects naked. The fact is that the Emperor is naked, and everyone can see it, but each chooses to override his or her natural ability to know what they know for the simple reason that they feel they might be in a minority. Now that is very important, it is the feeling of being in a minority, or being an individual, in the face of a large majority that erodes confidence, and it is confidence that is needed to speak or act out against a falsehood. 

This collective buying-in to a delusion is not really a delusion at all, for nothing is being imagined in this scenario, he is naked, what they see is the truth. So why then does everyone in this crowd act as if the emperor is clothed? I would further say that it is because people in a mass, numbers that could be said to be greater than a group or a gathering, will often go along with what is being presented to them. Individual doubt is a more common reaction to an apparent paradox of the senses than individual certainty. As for collective ignorance Vs collective awareness I think that argument has been settled long ago; a person can be smart, a collective tends to be reactionary and passion driven, easily manipulated by a confident and charismatic lunatic, and this happened on the left, the right, and in the centre ground since we often mistake confidence with competence (Trump & Johnson for example), or humility and reasonableness with weakness (Corbyn & Sanders for example). These people wish to be part of a herd or tribe, it is in our nature to favour self in matters of attainment of things, yet to favour others in matters of solving problems.

Now this could be called a mass gaslight, the social manifestation of a technique used by nefarious partners to undermine the confidence and assuredness of their other half concerning their sanity and their memory, to what end this serves I can only speculate. Or it could be seen as a social will for things to be as they are described, rather than they are demonstrated, this being often the objective of the powerful. Politicians and the like do this, as do banks, Disney TV, and advertisers. I mean, nobody really thinks that a building society is actually going to help them out of debt and into happiness, or that drinking a certain Cola will gain you many friends, or that using a certain feminine sanitary product will make you more able to play sports do they? But the suggestion is there and it works, or they wouldn’t push it.

The news media are very much a part, they decide what gets left out of the broadcast based on what it might make people feel, the marginal discourse as Foucault called it. The news often signs off with heart-warming stories so that the lingering thoughts of the audience are a view of the world as being good and righteous overall, news programs tend to be followed with TV shows like The One Show, or Countryfile, or some personality walking in lush countryside and calling into pubs. The evening dramas have us believing that crime gets solved, bad guys get caught, whereas the statistics on criminality would indicate otherwise. A person contemplating a life of crime may be bolstered by the fact that nobody ever really gets caught for theft and there’s virtually no chance that the victim will get their property back, very few rapists are ever caught and of those that are caught very few are actually prosecuted, granted murderers tend to be caught, but that’s because most people who are murdered are killed by somebody very close to them relationally. None of this narrative is left to chance, this TV device is not just entertaining you, it is programming you with a view of your nation, and the world. 

The internet was the way we could get away from this programming and see/share/examine/refute possible truth and lie, yet that too has been incorporated into the mainstream with government enacted laws on behavior and decency, brought in with the proposed goal of making the web safer for society. In truth it is an obvious attempt to limit what can be known and what can be explored. It is true that Information and opinion are dangerous if they are a wrong believed, but they are also as much a danger to established dogma. Wars, laws, treaties, and borders do not change the world much or in many ways, but stories can cause revolutions, “there is nothing more powerful than a good story” – Tyrion Lannister.

In the event that the queen passes from this mortal realm…. 

I have always been against the idea that we should have a monarchy. I believe it is barbaric and stupid to treat the past as if it were something to be proud of, with all the wrongs done to, and supposedly on behalf of, our ancestor commoners, by previous kings and queens that we can readily read about in history books, rather than something to be learned from and not repeated. Having a monarch makes subjects out of people who have historically struggled to, and morally deserve to, be free and equal. We grant the idea of power to the crown, but we have a long history in Britain of attempting to wrest that power from the monarch, and in the last ten centuries many brave souls have died in the struggle against these tyrants. I’m not saying the monarchy of Britain would be tyrants if they could, about that we can only speculate, but if we look at anywhere in the world that still has a monarchy as its government we will find a distinct lack of democracy (Saudi?). The idea that anyone is born better than anyone else, other than in the measurably physical, is an absurdity that, if accepted, opens the door to racial and wealth inequalities being normalized and unremarkable because of a simple accident of birth, who would choose to build a society on these terms?

Now let’s contend that If I continue to be entirely consistent in my opinion, the one I have held for as long as I can remember, then I am suddenly an insensitive monster on the day the queen dies, and for a lot of the days following, especially if I voice my thoughts. Simply because she has died I am wrong to not favour her right to have been what she had been for so long, and not to have accepted what she had represented; as if I was supposed to radically change my opinion of those things because the circumstances of her life and family have changed? This doesn’t even take into account the fact that it is her position I have been against, and not her personally. I have no idea whether she was a good person or otherwise because I did not know her personally, and I had no opportunity to know her in any way because she did not produce anything that let me know her, like a book or an interview where she wasn’t just reading a script that a team of advisors wrote to make her seem a certain, acceptable, palatable, way. The queen, as people think they know her, was a created character, a role played by a person who may have come to believe that they were in actuality that person, but just a role nonetheless. 

The same might be said for a celebrity I’m sure, but in many ways we can know these people beyond the movie or book they are involved with. I don’t know Woody Harrelson the actor from his roles, but I can know him from knowing what he is passionate about – animal protections and human rights, environmentalism, humanism, the legalization of weed, freedom of speech etc… so I can somewhat know him in a way I could never know the queen. It’s not just Woody, I know Christopher Hitchens because he wrote of what he viewed wrong with the world and had no filter or subject he wouldn’t tackle or back down from for the sake of someone else’s idea of decency, so I can/could respect, if not always agree with him. I was deeply saddened about Hitch’s death in 2011 in much the same way I was deeply saddened over the deaths of my close friend Joe, and later the passing of my brother Peter, like I had personally lost something important to me that I cared about. I think that’s a normal reaction to the loss of somebody who means something to you. I would argue the loss of the monarch is a structural loss at worst, nothing personal in it at all, and those crying on the mall in London are exhibiting a ridiculous sycophancy based on their own will or a societal expectation to feel something tragic.

I feel the outpouring of grief for the monarch, and the previous outpouring over Diana, are mistaken and badly thought out. They indicate a false personal relationship with a character that is an idea more than a person, yest there is a person involved and we should sympathize with her family for their loss, but that’s as far as it should go. True that we can cry at the narrative of a movie when an animal dies, or be scared when there is danger, or be motivated by an injustice, but we somewhat snap out of it when the credits roll. I’m not naive enough to think that we don’t retain and assimilate the experiences of the emotions we feel when vicariously absorbing a story, we are not robots of course. Yes seeing Jaws at the age of 10 might make you never go in the water again, but what I’m suggesting is that it is this very falsehood of the psychological self that is the issue we must endeavor to be better than. In most aspects of our lives I think most of us are capable of the sort of skepticism that keeps us from becoming drones, but only individually, not as a mass.

What I do know of the royals I disagree with, their position allows them to preach their thoughts as if they were proven, peer reviewed, positions supported by science, their education is skewed, their life experiences are minimal other than from a lofty aspect. None of them have known what it is like to reach into their pocket and only find their leg… In my opinion Prince Phillip was a dreadful individual, bent on travelling the world and enjoying the murder of exotic and rare species to satisfy his lust. He had teams of little brown people beat and hurd a tiger out of a forest so he could shoot it from an elevated platform at the sort of range where a first timer couldn’t have missed. He was a well known intolerant and an oft caught out racist. The queen and her sister gave Nazi salutes as children, caught on camera for all to see, and her uncle was an actual Nazi courtier. Prince Andrew was unwilling to distance himself from an exposed sex trafficker and the implications to him that might suggest, he conspired with his mother and the judiciary to pay off his accuser and the media very quickly dropped the matter, he provably lied to the country about his sweating habits (there’s pictures of him sweating) and his recollection of his movements could have been easily verified if true by the security detail he always has present but it was not, the queen backed him and acted to shove it under the rug to the tune of £12m of our money. Prince Harry dressed in a Nazi uniform for a party, then years later he and his wife effectively accused all white people of being Racists. If you didn’t accept that you were racist then you were a racist in denial, if you actively tried to prove yourself not to be a racist then you were a micro-racist, so you just couldn’t win under their logic. 

More sinisterly in my opinion, Megan told “her truth” on tv. As if the things she said did not necessarily have to actually be true, but could feel true to her, and therefore were true enough to have her assign to herself the oft used, and very powerful, position as a victim. This is a wonderful way to say that a thing may not have actually happened but you the loyal subject need to understand the gravity of how the princess felt if she imagined that it did, and of course then act and feel accordingly yourself. To even call for changes to things that aren’t broken because they could be in her speculations. To me that is a modern absurdity I think Camus would have loved, but where is our modern Camus to deconstruct it, where is our Christopher Hitchens to ridicule it? 

This is how much contempt the royals and their establishment have for the ordinary people, their truth, their ill-informed unsupported wisdom, their lofty one-dimensional view of the world, their power, their wealth, none of which has ever been merited earned or even inherited, just the right in law for them to have attributed to them by the government, and any questions one might have on the matter are met with the anti-nationalist, treasonous accusations. This all stems from a Hobbesian belief (Hobbes wrote Leviathan) that there must be a monarch, a servant of god to act as the definition of rightness for all to follow, without this we would fall to anarchy was his speculation. This view was proved wrong as countries became successful republics of course, but just like in the tale of the Emperor in the UK and commonwealth we chose to, or are propagandised to, think otherwise.

I put it to you that who would choose to be a subject of a monarch, who would, given the chance, build, or participate toward building, a structure like this one and still attempt to think of themselves as free? If the percentages that answer this question with a yes was, as I expect it would be, a lot lower than the other choice, then how do we so readily accept that this is the way it is to continue? Is there a moral argument to be made in support of the monarchy other than that nonsense from Hobbes? I’m sure we all remember the important intervention of the palace into the crisis the UK faced during the pandemic, or the homing of the homeless in the many unlived royal dwellings to mitigate a problem not created by but exacerbated by years of Tory rule, or the palaces being opened to Ukrainian refugees? Well none of that happened, for all the vast wealth the crown possesses none of it has ever been used to do anything than to provide for this one family. They act as the face of a charity, they pose in the garb of a landmine extractor, they wear the uniform and the medals of people who bravely fought and died, the royal family as a business supports many causes, yes, but do any of them actually participate or give coin to anything that matters? The answer is no, long ago it was written by Mark Twain, though he was likely not the first to observe it, that the man who has the world convinced he gets up at dawn, can sleep until midday.

Paul S Wilson